Hey there Plussers! I'm your friendly neighborhood G+ Server Eng Manager, and I wanted to take a little time to tell you some of the great things the G+ team is working on. As always, we listen carefully to your feedback, and in the coming months, we'll be focusing on your most highly requested areas of improvement, including:

We've heard your desire to stay informed about G+ product updates. Going forward, you can expect to hear more from me; our Product Managers, like +John Nack​, our Program Managers, like +Carter Gibson​; and Community Managers, like +Leanne Osborne​ and +Madeleine DeRome​. We'll try our best to reply to questions and keep you up to date on all the great progress.

They were talking about automation like spam filters, phishing protection, virus scanning of attachments, even automated categorization and filters. All of these require an algorithm to analyze (read) the content of emails. And yes, when you sign up for gmail, a reasonable person would expect the system to analyze their email to do these things.

Bryce Etheridge: If the carrier offered, say, a transcription service. Such a service would require access to content and I would be expected to understand that when i sign up. The same with an email spam filter.

This was a blast to test. Throwing stuff at machine learning to try and trip it up, then making the process repeatable and manageable, is a great challenge.

Starting today, when you pull up the list of stickers you can use to respond to someone, there’s a simple little option: “Turn a selfie into stickers.” Tap, and it prompts you to take a selfie. Then, Google’s image-recognition algorithms analyze your face, mapping each of your features to those in a kit illustrated by Lamar Abrams, a storyboard artist, writer, and designer for the critically acclaimed Cartoon Network series Steven Universe.